lunchbyteblog

"I have to be honest. After 17 years of teaching, I can't tell you how to teach. I can't even really describe what is the best way to do something." These are the words I wanted to say to our student teacher (ST) the other day. But I didn't say them. I mean, I kind of said them. But not really. And of course, we all know what good teaching looks like. We can tell who the "good" teachers are and who the "bad" teachers are can't we? We knew when we were in school. You remember then? "Man, this teacher is bad..." we thought to ourselves. District administrators think they know who is good. They have these neat reports to go on. They have TEST SCORES for crying out loud. Parents surely know. They can see reports and TEST SCORES online and in the paper. Sometimes parents even complain about their kids' teachers to other parents. Surely we all know what good teaching looks and sounds like. But ST and I were having...

Today, the staff of our school was having one of our first PLC meetings of the year. We were running through the business at hand, discussing some of the things that we have needed to get together and discuss. It was during this meeting that one of our new teachers, a lateral entry teacher, asked an innocent enough question. She asked simply, "I've got projects coming up next week and I was wondering if you guys would help me out by grading them in your classes, too?" Now let me state a couple of things about our school before I go any further. We think of ourselves as a project based school. Our students are constantly working on projects and problems of some kind. We were featured in an ASCD production based on PBLs! Secondly, we just finished a round of projects with the freshmen where all the teachers who taught freshmen spent part of their day grading freshmen projects. Thirdly, I work with an awesome bunch of people who will do anything to help kids become b...

try not to pass out from the shock. it's a blog update. of course, the passing out would require that someone was actually reading this blog at some point. i imagine you all eagerly checking lunchbyteblog every day, anxiously waiting another post. you must be forlorn by now. resigned to the fact that this blog has become something promised but never delivered upon. i follow in the footsteps of chinese democracy, duke nukem forever, and indiana jones and the crystal skull. hopefully though, this update won't suck as much as those bits of vaporware when they were finally and sadly released. what makes the long hiatus all the more confusing is that, for the longest time, i have considered myself a writer. i spent time in college studying writing. i wrote for the college paper. i have, over the years, written thousands of poems and have written quite a few in the time spent away from this blog. but i have written nary an update. that changes today. for my "return t...